Latest Publications

This new study in Malawi showed that conservation agriculture adoption is most influenced by the adoption by neighbors, which could have implications for the overall cost of encouraging conservation agriculture across a region.

A resilience-based approach to social protection that includes insurance is the only sustainable way to manage poverty in the long-term. However, even this approach will fail if worst-case climate change scenarios come to pass.

A new study from rural Nepal shows that when people have higher aspirations, up to a point, they tend to make greater investments toward a better future. However, when aspirations are too high compared to one's current status, those investments are most likely to fall.

Three seasons after BRAC programming ended in eastern Uganda there was no decline in rates of improved seed adoption and farmers still used the program’s cultivation techniques. The study also has larger implications for determining a program’s efficient duration outside of one set by funding cycles.

The study on a hypothetical area yield index insurance contract in Ecuador found that for most farmers in the sample, the area yield index insurance would have performed equally well or much better at the same dollar-for-dollar cost compared to the existing conventional insurance contract.

The typical challenges of basis risk and low uptake have plagued index insurance products for years, but AMA Innovation Lab researchers are crafting solutions by designing innovations around the structure of the insurance contracts.

In a randomized controlled trial to study the impact of farmers’ knowledge about soil quality, we find that national-level fertilizer recommendations may be both unfit and excessively costly for many farmers.

Our results suggest that enforcement mechanisms can actually damage cooperative behavior as players shift from cooperative harvest strategies to more self-interested ones that lead to the collapse of the shared resource.